[timst4]

Anthropogenic warming is increasing at a non-linear rate. If you are not preparing practically, financially, and emotionally for this fact, you are being myopic. I still hold out hope for fusion-based geo-engineering or radical innovation to battery technology. However, with every day that passes the potential for these solutions seems to further elude us.

[xyzelement]

When I was a kid in the 90s I had a teacher who was freaking out about peak oil. He was "preparing frantically" for it through extreme measures like not having children.

A few decades out, all those who were too "myopic" to freak turned out to be the winners. Like, if you were too dumb to know about peak oil you ended up making smarter decisions.

I think there's a healthy chance we'll look at our current mindset in a similar way a few years/decades out.

Frankly, I think the tide is already shifting. Even in this thread, enough folks are comfortable to say "just ain't that worried about it" which would have been unthinkable to admit even a few months ago.

[culi]

> unthinkable to admit even a few months ago

not sure what social groups you spend time in but I'd have guessed the majority of Americans don't really care. While two thirds of Americans think the government should do more to address it. In Gallup polling asking Americans which issue is the most important to them, only 2% put climate change as their top issue. The peak in 2022 was 5%. Also in May:

- the govt/leadership, 19% - inflation, 18% - economy in general, 12% - immigration, 8% - unifying the country, 5%

As someone who's organized climate strikes and protests I am definitely not surprised by these results.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...

[rcme]

I've gone from caring about climate change to complete apathy. The reason for my change in mindset is that I don't want to live in a world envisioned by climate change activists.

A few examples:

1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.

2) I want to eat meat.

3) I want to enjoy the benefits of concrete.

There aren't any practical methods of achieving carbon-neutral air travel, meat, and concrete (among many, many other things). The changes often proposed by climate activists are to stop flying and eating meat (I don't often see it suggested to stop using concrete because most people realize it's impossible). I don't know what the world will be like if we continue on our path. Perhaps climate change will ruin everything, perhaps it won't be as bad as predicted, or maybe we'll find a solution (e.g. geoengineering) I do know that life without modern conveniences is worse than life today. So to me, the choice is between something that might not have a future vs. something that definitely doesn't have a future.

[corney91]

> 1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.

If you're worried about future generations you'd want to limit the effects of climate change, which means reducing carbon output. Sending more carbon into the atmosphere now means our descendants will experience more dramatic climate change impacts, and also need to reduce their output even more. Or to put it another way, the more flights avoided now the more flights can potentially be taken in the future.

[morsch]

You could just fly less and eat less meat. Well, at least you're honest in your nihilism, hedonism, fatalism, whatever one would call it. The "this is fine" dog refusing to entertain a world where it's not drinking a cup of tea.

[xyzelement]

Or, you could fly and eat (and have children) to your hearts content and find out in a few years or decades that all the doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong (or, postponed another few decades again) and come out the winner.

[morsch]

Pretending like that's an option is certainly the most convenient way to go about it.

[ahoya]

This mindset always catches me off guard no matter how many times I come across it. I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily. Like what kind of lifestyle do you lead that these 3 things weigh so heavily? I happily minimize my use of all three of those things for even a small chance of making future lives better. I’m always shocked when I read how narrow some peoples spectrum of desires are.

[rcme]

> I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily.

Just curious, what do you care about?

[ecf]

> - the govt/leadership, 19% - inflation, 18% - economy in general, 12% - immigration, 8% - unifying the country, 5%

Seeing these bullet points listed out explains much of the reason we’re currently headed for some more war in the future.

[BurningFrog]

Humans seem hard wired to believe the world is ending. There is always some Armageddon being expected by large segments of society.

Of course, that doesn't mean they'll always be wrong!

[tbrownaw]

> which would have been unthinkable to admit even a few months ago.

That's more about feeling safe to be publicly seen to dissent. For people's actual beliefs you'd have to look at "revealed preferences" sort of things.

[notfromhere]

There's a fallacy in assuming this crisis will end like all other crises. Seems like a big risk to take when the planet's ability to sustain civilization is in question.

[todd8]

I agree that it is unlikely to be increasing precisely linearly, but do you have a more specific claim?

It is my understanding that the GCMs in use have many “tunable” parameters some of which are strongly stochastic, the component of the models are coupled, there are feedback loops that are poorly understood—some positive some negative, these feedback loops operate over all possible time scale from minutes to centuries. The systems of differential equations describing the models will not be analytic and worse will have chaotic solutions.

The dozens of existing GCMs don’t agree, but I’m not an expert so I can’t know which ones to trust. Furthermore, expert climate researchers very careers are at stake so there is no effort that I can detect to make all the data sets, source code, and design justifications open in ways to allow inspection by outsiders like myself.

I have worked professionally on environmental models only twice (over 40 years ago). One had the worst code I ever had to review (and I’ve taught CS at the university level!) and the other made simplify assumptions so ridiculous that the results were meaningless.

I used to be able to download pictures of hand written recorded weather station temperature data from 100 years ago. Now, I can no longer get to it from NOAA or NASA websites. What happened to it? (Perhaps, my Google-foo is failing me.)

I think many would agree that climate research is important or even existentially important for humankind. We already fund the research with our tax dollars. Why can’t the research be performed as openly as free software foundation projects? If I’m curious about the kind of LRU algorithm used by the ZFS file system cache, I can just clone the repo and read it myself. If I don’t understand why an Emacs feature has been deprecated, I can peruse the emacs-dev mailing list archive.

I want everyone (and especially those that are climate scientists) to have easy access to the data and climate models.

[Schroedingersat]

No miracle technology is needed. Just the will to use the solutions we have.

Solar + wind + pumped hydro + transmission is better than any thermal neutron based fusion generator could ever be, and the toolkit does not end there.

The only ingredients that really need improving are iron nitride magnets and undersea Al cables.

The grossest excesses of the wealthiest 10% need reigning in, but other than that, abundance can exist for all.

[swader999]

Source on that first sentence?

[culi]

actually seems pretty linear so far (tho extremely steep)

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

But most climate scientists agree there are many runaway effects we're headed for pretty directly like

- the runaway greenhouse effect

- ocean acidification causing the ocean to be less able to take up CO2 (the ocean is estimated to have offset 30-50% of co2 emitted by fossil fuels)

- more droughts -> deforestation -> hotter temperatures -> more droughts, etc

I could go on but you could also just read the IPCC reports. Believe it or not their quite easy to parse even for a layman. They make two versions of them, one for policymakers and one for academics but in my experience the academically oriented reports are actually more readable and useful

https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

If you want to skip to the most depressing/dooming one check out the 2019 report on oceans and the cryosphere

[swader999]

IPCC reports tell a fairly good story imo. The earth is much greener for instance due to CO2.

[medion]

There are thousands. Plus, just look around.

[drno__]

That doesn't answer their question.

[WarOnPrivacy]

Your account was one minute old when posting this retort. I think that answers something.

As for curious folks, they're highlighting the text in Q and r-clicking their way to answers.

[random314]

How does one prepare for this financially? I am at a total loss!